Automotive dealerships run on two very different but equally heavy data streams: high-resolution inventory photography and video walk-arounds for every vehicle on the lot, and the DMS (Dealer Management System) records covering sales, service history, and finance paperwork. Multi-location dealer groups often try to run both off a mix of local drives and cloud photo tools, and it breaks down the moment a general manager needs last quarter's numbers across five rooftops.
Inventory Media Piles Up Fast
A single vehicle listing today can include 40+ photos, a 360-degree spin, and a short video walkaround, multiplied across a lot that turns over hundreds of units a month. Photographers and marketing staff need fast read/write access to shared folders, not a slow cloud sync that lags behind the moment a car is priced and ready to list.
A dealership-grade NAS Appliance gives every rooftop a local, high-throughput share for inventory media, with replication back to a central location so group-level reporting always has current photos and videos to pull from.
DMS Data Needs a Real Backup Story
DMS platforms hold the financial and compliance backbone of the dealership: deal jackets, service records, and finance paperwork that regulators and auditors expect to be retrievable for years. Relying on the DMS vendor's own backup alone leaves dealer groups without an independent copy they control.
That's a large part of why dealer-group IT teams look into NAS Storage as the second, independently-controlled copy of DMS exports and nightly database dumps, rather than trusting a single vendor-hosted backup as the only copy.
Multi-Rooftop Consistency
Dealer groups spanning multiple locations need the same folder structure, the same access policy, and the same backup schedule at every rooftop, or IT ends up debugging a different setup at every site. Standardizing on a common NAS platform across locations turns that into a template that's deployed once and monitored centrally.
For groups weighing whether to centralize storage at HQ or keep it local to each rooftop, a SAN vs NAS vs DAS comparison is a useful starting point, since the right architecture depends on how much bandwidth exists between locations and how tolerant the business is of a WAN outage cutting off remote sites from central storage.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Most successful dealer-group deployments land on local NAS storage at each rooftop for day-to-day inventory media and DMS backups, with scheduled replication to a group-level NAS or cloud target for disaster recovery. Marketing gets fast local access to photos, finance keeps an independent backup of DMS records, and group leadership gets one place to pull consolidated reporting from — without waiting on a slow cloud sync during the busiest sales days of the month.
